One ton. One thousand HP. For sale. Why are you still looking at that holiday gift catalog?

There are few surer signs of automotive perfection in the lunatic sense than the circumstances surrounding the TVR Speed 12’s birth—or rather, its death. Peter Wheeler, the recently deceased then-head of TVR, a company known for building lunatic cars, deemed it undriveable.

He may have had a point there. TVR’s are known for being very light, very powerful and utterly devoid of driver’s aids. They do precisely what you tell them to do. Like low-level machine code, in a sense. Yet there are probably not many people out there who speak the precise dialect of a one-ton plastic car powered by a 1000 HP V12 engine. And like a proper French waiter who will scoff at any foreigner’s accent, the Speed 12 was probably very ready to murder its every owner.

But at least it’s your call now and not Mr. Wheeler’s. The one Speed 12 ever manufactured is currently on sale for an unspecified sum. And for the brief time you’ll be alive as its owner, you can bask in the glory of your car having received a rating of 17 11.5 stars on a scale of 1 to 5 in the October 2005 issue of Evo magazine.